Creating Interest

If you’ve read more than one of my blogs, you know that I pay special attention to how a book begins. I didn’t learn to read entirely by rea...

There are times during a summer when the exhaustion of hybridizing daylilies is relieved by a trip to see distant friends. At such times, I ...

Hello darkness, my old friend.... That's the first line of Paul Simon's I remember, from The Sound of Silence . Even then, when I wa...

A year or so after leaving Santa Fe, a place of unique beauty and a certain theatrical self-consciousness, I picked up a liking for Latin Am...

I’ve been working with a group that I refer to as “The Think Tank.” They are smart, smart people who work in the museum field and serve fro...

Lola the Poodle went to Melanie's beauty parlor yesterday. When she's due for a bath and haircut, she begins to act like a tramp. Af...

Yesterday I wrote about Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman. It's such a wonderful combination of deep thinking and great narrative sty...